Abdullah Yusuf Azzam (Arabic: عبد الله يوسف عزام, ‘Abdu’llāh Yūsuf ‘Azzām; 1941 – November 24, 1989) a.k.a. Father of Global Jihad[1][2] was a highly influential Palestinian Sunni Islamic scholar and theologian, who preached in favor of both defensive jihad and offensive jihad by Muslims to help the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet invaders and became a leader of Al Qaeda.[3] He raised funds, recruited, and organized the international Islamic volunteer effort of Afghan Arabs through the 1980s, and emphasised the political ascension of Islam.
He is also known as a teacher and mentor of Osama bin Laden, and persuaded bin Laden to come to Afghanistan and help the jihad,[4] though the two differed as to where the next front in global jihad should be after the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan.[5][6] He was also a co-founder of Hamas and Lashkar-e-Taiba.[7][8][9] He was killed by a bomb blast on November 24, 1989.[10]
Early life in the West Bank
Abdullah Yusuf Azzam was born in 1941 in the Palestinian village of Silat al-Harithiya, about eight kilometers northwest of the city of Jenin in the West Bank, then administered under the British Mandate for Palestine, which covered the two sectors of Palestine and Transjordan.[6][11][12]
Though it is difficult to distinguish between hagiographical material and fact, Azzam is described by most of his biographers as being exceptionally intelligent as a child. He liked to read, excelled in class, and studied topics above his grade level.[11][12]
In the mid-1950s, Azzam joined the Muslim Brotherhood after being influenced by Shafiq Asad `Abd al-Hadi, an elderly local teacher who was a member of the Brotherhood. Recognizing Azzam's sharp mind, Shafiq Asad gave Azzam a religious education and introduced him to many of the Brotherhood's leaders in Palestine. Azzam became more interested in Islamic studies and started a study group in his village. Shafiq Asad then introduced Azzam to Muhammad `Abd ar-Rahman Khalifa, the Muraqib `Am (General Supervisor) of the Brotherhood in Jordan. Khalifa met with and encouraged Azzam during several visits that he made to Silat al-Harithiya. During this part of his life, Azzam began reading the works of Hasan al-Banna and other Brotherhood writings.[11]
In the late 1950s, after he had completed his elementary and secondary education, Azzam left Silat al-Harithiya and enrolled in the agricultural Khaduri College in Tulkarm, about 30 kilometers southwest of his village. Though he was a year younger than his classmates, he received good grades.[11][12]
After graduation from the college, students were sent out to teach at local schools. Azzam was sent to the village of Adir, near the town of Kerak in central Jordan.[11][12] According to one of his biographers, Azzam had wanted a position closer to home, but was sent to a distant school after an argument with his college's dean.[11]
After spending a year in Adir, Azzam returned to the West Bank, where he taught at a school in the village of Burqin, about four kilometers west of Jenin. His colleagues in Burqin remembered him as being noticeably more religious than them. During breaks, while others ate, Azzam would sit and read the Quran.[11]
Religious studies in Damascus
In 1963, Azzam enrolled in the Faculty of Sharia at the University of Damascus in Syria. While in Damascus, he met Islamic scholars and leaders including Shaykh Muhammad Adib Salih, Shaykh Sa`id Hawwa, Shaykh Muhammad Sa`id Ramadan al-Buti, Mullah Ramadan al-Buti, and Shaykh Marwan Hadid.[11]
In 1964, Azzam's mentor, Shafiq Asad `Abd al-Hadi, died. This strengthened Azzam's determination in working for the cause of Islam. During the holidays, Azzam would return to his village, where he would teach and preach in the mosque.[11]
Azzam graduated with highest honors in 1966, receiving a B.A. in Sharia (Islamic law). Thereafter he returned to the West Bank, where he taught and preached in the region around his village. After the 1967 Six-Day War ended in Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, Azzam and his family left the West Bank and followed the Palestinian exodus to Jordan.[11][12]
Life in Jordan and Egypt
In Jordan, Azzam participated in paramilitary operations against the Israeli occupation but became disillusioned with the secular and provincial nature of the Palestinian resistance coalition held together under the umbrella of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and led by Yasser Arafat. Instead of pursuing the PLO’s Marxist-oriented national liberation struggle supported by the Soviet Union, Azzam envisioned a pan-Islamic trans-national movement that would transcend the political map of the Middle East drawn by non-Islamic colonial powers.[13] He is believed to have had a role in founding the Islamist Hamas movement in Palestine.[citation needed]
Azzam then went to Egypt to continue Islamic studies at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University where he earned a Master’s degree in Sharia. He returned to teach at the University of Jordan in Amman. In 1971, Azzam received a scholarship to once again attend Al-Azhar University where he obtained his Ph.D. in the Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Usool ul-Fiqh) in 1973.
During theological studies in Egypt, Azzam met Omar Abdel-Rahman, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri and other followers of Sayyed Qutb, an extremely influential leader of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, who had been executed by President Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966.[citation needed] Azzam adopted elements of Sayyed Qutb’s ideology, including beliefs in an inevitable “clash of civilizations” between the Islamic world and non-Islamic world, and in the necessity of violent revolution against secular governments to establish an Islamic state.[citation needed]
Life in Saudi Arabia
After obtaining his Doctorate in Egypt in 1973, Azzam returned to teach at the University of Jordan, but his radical views were suppressed there.[citation needed] So Azzam then moved to Saudi Arabia. Since the 1960s, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had welcomed exiled teachers from Syria, Egypt, and Jordan,[citation needed] so that by the early 1970s it was common to find many Saudi high school and university teachers who had become involved with exiled dissident members of the Muslim Brotherhood.[citation needed]
Azzam took a position as lecturer at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where he remained until 1979. Osama bin Laden had grown up in Jeddah, and was enrolled as a student in the university there between 1976 and 1981 and he probably first made contact with Azzam at that time.[14]
Life in Pakistan and Afghanistan
1979 became a pivotal year for Islamic movement[disambiguation needed], with three huge revolutionary events in the Muslim world. First, on January 16, 1979 the Iranian Revolution succeed in taking over the country and exiling the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which then brought about the world's first modern Muslim theocracy under the rule of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
The second major attempt at Islamic revolution that year was the November 20, 1979 Grand Mosque Seizure at Mecca, in western Saudi Arabia, the holiest site in Islam. The two week siege and bloody ending shocked the Muslim world, as hundreds were killed in the ensuing battles and executions. The event was explained as a fundamentalist dissident revolt against the Saudi regime. The Saudi regime responded with repression, and in 1979, Azzam was expelled from the university at Jeddah. He then moved to Pakistan to be close to the nascent Afghan Jihad.[citation needed]
In the third major event of the year, on December 25, 1979 the Soviet Union, attempting to suppress a growing Islamic rebellion, deployed the 40th Army into Afghanistan, in support of advisors it already had in place there.
Support for Afghan mujahideen
When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Azzam issued a fatwa, Defense of the Muslim Lands, the First Obligation after Faith[15] declaring that both the Afghan and Palestinian struggles were jihads in which killing occupiers of your land (no matter what their faith) was fard ayn (a personal obligation) for all Muslims. The edict was supported by Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti (highest religious scholar), Abd al-Aziz Bin Bazz.
In Pakistan in 1980, Azzam began to teach at International Islamic University in Islamabad. Soon thereafter, he moved from Islamabad to Peshawar, closer to the Afghan border, where he then established Maktab al-Khadamat (Services Office) to organize guest houses in Peshawar and paramilitary training camps in Afghanistan to prepare international recruits for the Afghan war front.
Peshawar is a major border city of a million people in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa of Pakistan. From there, Azzam was able to organize resistance directly on the Afghan frontier. Peshawar is only 15 km east of the historic Khyber Pass, through the Safed Koh mountains, connected to the southeastern edge of the Hindu Kush range. This route became the major avenue of inserting foreign fighters and material support into eastern Afghanistan for the resistance against the Soviets.
After Osama bin Laden graduated from the university in Jeddah in 1981, he also came to live for a time in Peshawar, "Azam prevailed on him to come and use his money" for training recruits, according to The News International.[16] Some have suggested that Mohammed Atef was responsible for convincing Azzam to abandon his academic pursuits to devote himself solely to preaching jihad.[17]
Through al-Khadamat, bin Laden's fortune paid for air tickets and accommodation, dealt with paperwork with Pakistani authorities and provided other such services for the jihad fighters. To keep al Khadamat running, bin Laden set up a network of couriers travelling between Afghanistan and Peshawar, which continued to remain active after 2001, according to Rahimullah Yusufzai, executive editor of The News International.
After orientation and training, Muslim recruits volunteered for service with various Afghan militias tied to Azzam. In 1984, Osama bin Laden founded Bait ul-Ansar (House of Helpers) in Peshawar to expand Azzam’s ability to support “Afghan Arab” jihad volunteers and, later, to create his own independent militia.
In 1988, Azzam convinced Ahmed Khadr to raise funds for an alleged new charity named al-Tahaddi based in Peshawar. He granted Khadr a letter of commendation to take back to Canadian mosques, calling for donations. However, the pair had a sensationalist showdown when Khadr insisted that he had a right to know how the money would be spent, and Azzam's supporters labelled Khadr a Western spy. A Sharia court was convened in bin Laden's compound, and Azzam was found guilty of spreading allegations against Khadr, though no sentence was imposed.[18]
Employing tactics of asymmetric warfare, the Afghan resistance movement was able to fend off the Soviet Union's superior military forces throughout most of the war, although the lightly armed Afghan mujahideen suffered enormous casualties. The Saudi Arabian government and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) gradually increased financial and military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen forces throughout the 1980s in an effort to stem Soviet expansionism and to destabilize the Soviet Union.
Azzam frequently joined Afghan militias and international Muslim units as they battled the Soviet Union's forces in Afghanistan. He sought to unify elements of the resistance by resolving conflicts between mujahideen commanders and he became an inspirational figure among the Afghan resistance and freedom-fighting Muslims worldwide for his passionate attachment to jihad against foreign occupation.[citation needed]
In the 1980s, Azzam traveled throughout the Middle East, Europe and North America, including 50 cities in the United States, to raise money and preach about jihad. He inspired young Muslims with stories of miraculous deeds, mujahideen who defeated vast columns of Soviet troops virtually single-handed, who had been run over by tanks but survived, who were shot but unscathed by bullets. Angels were witnessed riding into battle on horseback, and falling bombs were intercepted by birds, which raced ahead of the jets to form a protective canopy over the warriors.[19]
In Steven Emerson's 1994 television documentary Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America, he showed a video of Abdullah Azzam in Brooklyn urging his audience to wage jihad in America (which Azzam explains "means fighting only, fighting with the sword"), and Fayiz Azzam (a cousin of Abdullah) tells an Atlanta audience: "Blood must flow. There must be widows; there must be orphans."[20]
Global Jihad
Azzam's trademark slogan was "Jihad and the rifle alone: no negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues." In Join the Caravan, Azzam implored Muslims to rally in defense of Muslim victims of aggression, to restore Muslim lands from foreign domination, and to uphold the Muslim faith.[21]
Azzam built a scholarly, ideological and practical paramilitary infrastructure for the globalization of Islamist movements that had previously focused on separate national, revolutionary and liberation struggles. Azzam’s philosophical rationalization of global jihad and practical approach to recruitment and training of Muslim militants from around the world blossomed during the Afghan war against Soviet occupation and proved crucial to the subsequent development of the al-Qaida militant movement.[3] In 1989, after the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan, Azzam and his deputy Osama bin Laden decided to keep their movement permanent and founded the Al Qaeda.[3]
Like earlier influential Islamist Sayyid Qutb, Azzam urged the creation of `pioneering vanguard`, as the core of a new Islamic society. `This vanguard constitutes the solid base` [qaeda in Arabic] for the hoped-for society ... We shall continue the jihad no matter how long the way, until the last breath and the last beat of the pulse - or until we see the Islamic state established.'[22] From its victory in Afghanistan jihad would liberate Muslim land (or land where Muslims for a minority in the case of the Philippines or formerly Muslim land in the case of Spain) ruled by unbelievers: the southern Soviet Republics of Central Asia, Bosnia, the Philippines, Kashmir, Somalia, Eritrea, and Spain. He believed the natural place to continue the jihad was his birthplace, Palestine. Azzam planned to train brigades of Hamas fighters in Afghanistan, who would then return to carry on the battle against Israel."[23]
This put him at odds with another influential faction of the Afghan Arabs the Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) and its leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.[citation needed] The next group of "unbelievers" the EIJ wanted to jihad against were not Israeli Jews, European Christians or Indian Hindus, but self-professed Muslims of the Egyptian government and other secular Muslim governments.[citation needed] For the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, takfir against the allegedly impious Egyptian government was central,[24] but Azzam opposed takfir of Muslims – including takfir of Muslim governments – which he believed spread fitna and disunity within the Muslim community.
Assassination
In 1989, a first attempt on his life failed, when a lethal amount of TNT explosive was placed beneath the pulpit from which he delivered the sermon every Friday. The Arab mosque was in the University Town neighbourhood in western Peshawar, in Gulshan Iqbal Road. Abdullah Azzam used the mosque as the jihad center, according to a Reuters inquiry in the neighborhood. Had the bomb exploded, reportedly it would have destroyed the mosque, and killed everybody in it.[25]
But then on November 24, 1989, Muhammad Azzam was driving his father and brother to Friday prayers in Peshawar, when unknown assassins detonated a bomb as the vehicle approached; lying in a narrow street across from a gas station, the explosive had a 50 metre detonation cord which led to the sewerage system where the assailant presumably waited.[26]
According to Time magazine Waheed Muzhda had noticed what he assumed was a crew doing routine road maintenance working on the culvert where the bomb was placed, the day before the assassination.[27]
Azzam and his sons were buried near the same site as his mother the year before, the Pabi Graveyard of the Shuhadaa' (martyrs), in Peshawar.
Suspects in the assassination include competing Islamic militia leaders, the CIA, and the Israeli Mossad.[28]
Since the Soviet Union had withdrawn all troops from Afghanistan by this time, the CIA would not seem to have an obvious reason to assassinate Azzam. Many suspect the killing was part of a purge of those who favored moving the jihad to Palestine. In March 1991, Mustapha Shalabi, who ran the Maktab al-Khidmat, the Services Bureau in New York and was also "said to prefer a `Palestine next` strategy, turned up dead in his apartment." He was replaced by Wadih el-Hage, who later became bin Laden's personal secretary.[29]
Osama bin Laden has also been accused of being a suspect in the murder, but seems to have remained on good terms with Azzam during this time.[30] However, it was reported that Bin Laden and Azzam also had a major dispute on where Al Qaeda should focus their operations.[3] Bin Laden favored using the organization to train fighters in various parts of the world whilst Azzam favored on just keeping the training camps in Afghanistan.[3]
Yet another actor accused of the hit is Iranian intelligence,[31] an active adversary of Salafi Islam. In 2009, Jordanian double agent Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi claimed knowledge of Jordanian Dairat al-Mukhabarat al-Ammah cooperation with the CIA to set up the assassination.[32]
Legacy
After his death, Azzam’s militant ideology and related paramilitary manuals were promoted through print and Internet media by Azzam Publications, which described itself as "an independent media organisation providing authentic news and information about Jihad and the Foreign Mujahideen everywhere." The publishing house operated from a London post office box (Azzam Publications—BMC UHUD, LONDON, WC1N 3XX) and an Internet site, www.azzam.com, that were shut down shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks and are no longer active, though mirror sites persisted for some time afterwards. Babar Ahmad, the alleged administrator of azzam.com, is awaiting extradition from Great Britain to the USA.
In terms of ideas, Azzam’s belief in jihad – 'one hour in the path of jihad is worth more than 70 years of praying at home' – has had considerable impact. Azzam is thought to had influence on jihadists such as al-Qaeda with the third stage of his "four-stage process of jihad". This third stage was "ribat," defined as "placing oneself at the frontlines where Islam was under siege". This idea is thought to reinforce militants "perception of a civilizational war between Islam and the West".[33]
Quotes
- "Indeed he (Ahmad Shah Massoud) is the hero of Islam."[34]
- "Muslims cannot be defeated by others. We Muslims are not defeated by our enemies, but instead, we are defeated by our own selves."[citation needed]
Written works
- Defense of the Muslim Lands: The First Obligation after Faith, 1979 (many typographical errors); 2002 (second English ed., revised with improved citations and spelling.) Is a study on the legal rulings of Jihad. It discusses the types of Jihad, the conditions under which Jihad becomes an obligation upon all Muslims, parents’ permission, fighting in the absence of the Islamic State, and peace treaties with the enemy.)
- Join the Caravan, 1987, 1991 (second English ed.) (An appeal for Muslims to establish “a solid foundation as a base for Islam” in Afghanistan by expelling the Russian invaders of this Muslim land. The author quoted extensively from the Quran and the ahadeeth in establishing his jurisprudence reasoning as to why there is now an individual obligation (Fard Ain) for committed Muslims to travel to Pakistan-Afghanistan and become active combatants - mujahideen themselves.)
- The Lofty Mountain (A biographical book on the life of Tameem Adnani, a scholar of the Afghan Jihad. It contains a unique, descriptive, first-hand account of the famous Lion's Den Operation in Jaji, Afghanistan, in 1987 whereby 50 Mujahideen held off a month-long assault by several battalions of Soviet and Communist soldiers.)
- The Signs of The Merciful in the Jihad of the Afghan (A fully checked and revised version of a book listing over a hundred eyewitness alleged accounts of miracles experienced by the Mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan Jihad, from perfumed bodies of martyrs to accounts of angels helping the Mujahideen, and other claims..)
- Lovers of the Paradise Maidens (Lovers of the Paradise Maidens contains the biographies and stories of over 150 Mujahideen who died in the Soviet-Afghan Jihad.)
.jpg)
0 Comments